Slang and the Internet Connie Eble University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill In keeping with the ABRAPUI conference theme of “New Challenges in Language and Literature,” this essay shows that the vocabulary type called slang has adapted to the new social contexts created by the Internet and continues to serve the same purposes in the twenty-first century as it has since the eighteenth century when slang was first described for English as the vocabulary of underworld groups. Although the social purposes of slang may well be close to the same, the social contexts are vastly different. Scholarship that is to describe slang accurately in the twenty-first century must be attuned to both what is old about slang and what is new. The study of slang has always faced challenges in the academy because the entrenched language variety of higher education throughout the world is the standard, written variety of a language. And that register excludes slang, thereby assigning it to an inferior position. In western Europe until the eighteenth century, even choosing to write for serious purposes in a vernacular rather than in Latin cast suspicion on the educational credentials of the writer. At major British and American universities, the reading and study of literature written in English became part of the curriculum only in the nineteenth century. For English, the register preferred in the expository writing of the educated in all fields of study has included a high proportion of Latinate and bookish words, and little tolerance of regional and colloquial vocabulary, including slang. Thus it is not surprising that regional varieties of English and vocabulary associated with everyday life or minority groups were perceived as curious and perhaps amusing or quaint but not to be used in serious writing and too trivial to study. 81 New Challenges in Language and Literature, FALE/UFMG, 2009. In the systematic study of language now called linguistics, the shift from old-fashioned philology to structuralism to generative grammar in the academy did little to change the lack of interest in slang or improve its status. With few exceptions, the best studies of slang were done by lexicographers and others outside the academy. The leading journals in linguistics throughout the twentieth century almost never published articles on slang (the exception was American Speech begun in 1925 and now the official journal of the American Dialect Society). The development in the twentieth century of the disciplines called the social sciences – e.g., anthropology, psychology, sociology, and social history – likewise resulted in little interest in slang. Across the disciplines that sought to bring scientific objectivity to the study of human behavior, slang vocabulary was considered an embellishment to language, a non-essential and accidental component of the lexicon that could be ignored with little loss to the understanding of human behavior. The development of sociolinguistics over the past half century, however, has helped legitimize the study of slang. Sociolinguistics correlates variation and change in linguistic form with social factors. Because slang is essentially a linguistic expression of social affiliation, this type of lexis is central to the concerns of sociolinguistics. Although slang studies do not have to fight for legitimacy in sociolinguistics, the standard controlled fieldwork of sociolinguistics in which factors of gender, race, class, and age are correlated with features of language does not readily lend itself to the study of slang. The social dimensions of slang are not necessarily like those that can be attributed to an internal variable like loss of final consonant clusters. Slang may be better explained, for example, in a social network model. One of the greatest challenges to scholarship in slang is to fit slang into the current conversations going on in sociolinguistics about such topics as identity, power, community formation, stereotypying, discrimination and the like. This essay first outlines the general characteristics of slang, with particular reference to the slang of American college students. Then it examines the use of slang on the Internet, mainly the World Wide Web. In Internet use, slang has successfully crossed from oral to written realization. Because of its primarily social functions, slang has also adapted to synchronous Internet communication like chatrooms, which take advantage of the group-identifying effects of slang use. The term slang has always eluded precise definition, largely because slang words and expressions are not distinguished by form from other 82 EBLE. Slang and the Internet, p. 81-95. types of lexis (Eble, “Slang, Argot, and Ingroup Codes” 414). Slang serves the social functions of language, and the recurring characteristics associated with slang are the result of its social function (Eble, Slang and Sociability ch. 1). —Slang is a component of spoken interaction and is seldom used in writing. —Slang signals informality and often irreverence or defiance. —Slang is the distinctive vocabulary of groups: the use of the same slang enhances group identity and separates insiders from outsiders. —Slang meanings are often derived entirely from situational context and can be ironic. —The slang a group uses changes quickly. Slang is rooted in social connections. The power to evoke feelings of being connected to other – of belonging to a group, of being accepted, and of being socially secure – distinguishes slang from other sorts of informal vocabulary. People who use the same slang feel connected to each other and disconnected from those who do not. Dank and swell, for example, are denotatively comparable. Both mean ‘good’ in the sentences “That concert was dank” and “That concert was swell.” The choice of dank rather than swell, or vice-versa, gives no distinguishing information about the concert, but it does give distinguishing information about the speakers. It reveals the different groups that the speakers identify with and feel connected to. Slang is associated with groups. Knowing and keeping up with constantly changing in-group vocabulary is often an unstated requirement of group membership, and inability to master the slang can result in discomfort or estrangement. The group-identifying functions of slang are not disputable, perhaps because they are so obvious and have been experienced by nearly everyone. Speakers use slang when they want to be creative, clear, and acceptable to a select group. In addition, a group’s slang often provides users with automatic linguistic responses that assign others to either an in crowd or an out crowd. For example, during school year 2006-2007 undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill1 had at least 26 nouns to label someone negatively and 34 words and phrases to name or characterize a positive experience. See Table 1. 1 For a description of the way in which I have collected student slang at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the limitations of the corpus, see Eble, Slang and Sociability, 4-6. 83 New Challenges in Language and Literature, FALE/UFMG, 2009. TABLE 1 2006-2007 University of North Carolina Student Slang Evaluative Terms Negative: asshole, bama, bizmarkie, d-bag, douche, douchebag, douchebat, douche cannon, fag, fucker, hater, heffa, hoodrat, jackass, jerk, lawyer, loser, mark, player, shithead, sketchball, tool, toolbag, toolbox, trailer park trash, and winner Positive: baller, banging ,beast, bitching, the bomb, boston, bumping, choice, clean, cool, crazy, dank, dope, fetch, fly, hot, hotsauce, ill, killer, like steak, money, nasty, phat, popping, rad, rocking, sexy, the shits, sick, sweet, the ticket, tight, wicked, win. It has been well documented in English-speaking contexts since the eighteenth century that particular kinds of groups are breeding grounds for an idiosyncratic vocabulary to enhance their solidarity. Groups that operate on the periphery of society—prisoners, thieves, drug dealers, con-artists, gamblers, musicians and nightclub performers, carnival workers, and enlisted personnel in the military, to name a few – seem particularly adept at creating slang. Some slang-producing groups engage in activities that are disreputable or illegal. Others, like low-ranking military personnel, feel isolated from mainstream society because they lack freedom and ordinary access to the channels of power. Most groups whose colorful slang has been reported in numerous popular publications for more than two centuries lead lives in which the printed word, mastery of the standard written forms of language, and formal education are not important. By contrast, the oral language of these groups is often rich, complex, and powerful, and they live by using it effectively (Eble, “Slang and Antilanguage” 265-66). Robert Chapman calls the specialized social vocabulary of subcultures primary slang (xii). The primary slang of groups is often appropriated into general slang. It strikes members of the mainstream who adopt it as novel, rich, and imaginative. It suggests a way of life with greater fun and excitement than the well-regulated lives of most. Adopting the vocabulary is a way of sharing vicariously in the daring while remaining apart from what is unsafe or objectionable about the way of life in the subculture. The argot of the racetrack, for instance, is responsible for a number of words that now apply more generally than to horse racing: a piker is an ‘unimportant or inconsequential participant,’ a ringer an ‘illegal